Jackie and Chloe
2018 - Photography (Photography)
37.5 x 50 inches
Carolyn Drake
Jackie and Chloe by Carolyn Drake is from a series of works titled Knit Club . For this project, Drake collaborated with an enigmatic group of women in Mississippi who loosely call themselves “Knit Club”. There is a strangeness to this photograph; details of facial identity are withheld. The mother’s face is obscured by an amorphous mask of plaster. She looks at the camera, but without eyes there’s no emotional connection. Even the connection to her daughter is unclear, and non-specific. Drake explains: “In this picture, Jackie’s daughter Chloe came to comfort her while she was waiting for the face mold to dry. The mold was made by a local artist, an older man named Bill Beckwith who lives in the county. I asked the women from the Knit Club to sit for us one by one throughout the day, accumulating a series of molds and masks of their collective faces. I was interested in the negative space held by the mold more than the mask itself, the thing that, like a film negative, is made to be replicated. And like photographs, the molds are physically not more than surface. Despite its refusal to reveal a face, this particular picture also carries an emotional weight, a feeling of erasure, suffocation, but also strength, empathy, compassion.”
Carolyn Drake works on long term photo-based projects that involve travel and collaboration. In her most recent project, Knit Club , she’s returned to a style of working that involves actively collaborating with her subjects on co-producing objects and selecting props that become involved in the staging of photographs. This way of working emerged after her time as a photojournalist in foreign countries, and seeing the complicated and often problematic divide between author and subject, the real and the imaginary. Drake is one of only a handful of women photographers working in contemporary art today. Between 2007 and 2013, Drake traveled frequently to Central Asia from her base in Istanbul to work on two long term projects: Two Rivers (2013) explores the connections between ecology, culture and political power along the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers; and Wild Pigeon (2014) is an amalgam of photographs, drawings, and embroideries made in collaboration with Uyghurs in western China. In another project, Internat (2014-2017), Drake worked with young women in an ex-Soviet orphanage in the Ukraine to create photographs and paintings that point beyond the walls of the institution and its gender expectations. Her most recent body of work is Knit Club , which emerged through her collaboration with an enigmatic group of women in Mississippi loosely calling themselves “Knit Club” and is currently shortlisted for the Photo Book of the Year Award with Aperture/Paris Photo.
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